USA

ByCompiled from wire service reports by Robert Kilborn and Ross AtkinNovember 17, 2004

President Bush wasted no time in naming National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as his choice to replace Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Powell's resignation was announced Monday. Rice, who is considered more of a foreign policy hard-liner than Powell, is an expert on Russian and East European foreign and defense policy. Before joining the administration in 2001, she was provost at Stanford University. So far, six members of Bush's first-term cabinet have left and speculation mounts that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson may be the next to go.

The Pentagon said Monday that it's investigating the videotaped fatal shooting of a wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner by a US Marine. The footage was taken Saturday inside a mosque under US control in Fallujah. The incident, recorded by an embedded NBC-TV correspondent, captures an exchange in which a Marine yells that a captive is only faking death before he was shot. A Marine in the same unit was killed a day earlier as he tended to an insurgent's booby-trapped remains.

Forty-three Cuban dancers, singers, musicians, and stagehands performing at a Las Vegas casino asked for asylum in the US Monday. Cuban authorities reportedly were not supportive of the trip, and cast members were concerned that they'd be forced to quit performing if they returned to Havana. There was no immediate reaction to their defections by Fidel Castro's government. Above, Yahima Elias, a singer with the Havana Night Club show, waits for a bus taking the troupe to apply for asylum.

An FBI informant, distraught at being unable to return to Yemen to visit his ill wife, set himself afire near the White House Monday. Mohamed Alanssi of Falls Church, Va., was treated for non-life-threatening injuries. Alanssi, who had provided the FBI with information on terrorist financiers, told The Washington Post in a recent interview that he was upset that the agency hadn't kept its promises to him.

Upheaval within the CIA under new Director Porter Goss took a new turn Monday, with word that two top-ranking members of covert operations, Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick, were leaving. It was unclear whether they resigned voluntarily or were asked to step down.